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SECTION 1
Rain gardens
INTRODUCTION This book is all about the emerging idea of the rain garden. From relatively modest beginnings in the late 1980s in the state of Maryland, USA, the concept has mushroomed into one of the fastest growing areas of interest for the development of home landscapes. Unlike many other environmental initiatives that challenge us to change our lifestyles, often at personal cost, and that usually focus on the scientific or environmental benefits of what we may be doing, rain gardens have the potential to be beautiful additions to our environment, and bring with them a host of other benefits. As will be shown later in the book, technically a rain garden has come to mean something very specific, namely a planted depression that is designed to take all, or as much as possible, of the excess rainwater run-off from a house or other building and its associated landscape. However, we feel that the term is such an evocative one that we use a much more wide-ranging definition, which covers all the possible elements that can be used to capture, channel, divert and make the most of the natural rain and snow that falls on a property. The whole garden becomes a rain garden, and all of the individual elements that we deal with in detail are either components of it, or are small-scale rain gardens in themselves. Rain gardens are therefore about water in all its forms, still and moving, above and below ground, and the rich planting and experiential opportunities that exploiting that water can give rise to. The book is divided into three sections. This first section takes a wider 13
